Wynken

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The dreamy sailor boy of Eugene Field's children's lullaby who drifts off to sleep ; the late fifteenth-century printer who continued William Caxton's London press
2. A sleepy young seafarer from a bedtime poem by Eugene Field ; a printer active in London after Caxton, who carried on his press and type work
3. The fanciful child dreamer in Eugene Field's nursery rhyme ; the English printing craftsman who inherited and ran Caxton's workshop in London

Etymology: Wynken is not an old English word. It is a given name that the American writer Eugene Field placed in his nursery poem about three children who sail off to sleep in a wooden shoe, "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod." Field seems to have borrowed the name from the printer Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's former assistant, whose name was spelled in several ways. Its sound suits the poem's playful rhythm, and the poem gave it a new life as a whimsical name. The name is probably a diminutive of an older Germanic personal name, though the exact origin is uncertain. The printer's own name came from a German-speaking background, not from English, so the word carries a continental flavour that Field likely found appealing. Its only real meaning now is the child in the poem, so the word has no sense beyond the name itself.